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In October, the same month Elon Musk was acquiring Twitter, he took out what the Wall Street Journal describes as an “unusual” $1 billion loan from SpaceX. The following month, he paid it back in full, plus interest. It’s not clear what the loan was for, and Musk has not commented on the article. He put up about $25 billion in cash in late October as part of his $44 billion Twitter takeover. In November and December he also sold billions of dollars worth of his Tesla stock—over a time period of more than a year, the amount of Tesla stock he sold ended up totaling $39 billion. As the Journal pu…

Britney Spears has broken her silence on her pending divorce, which apparently came as a shock. The singer acknowledged her split from Sam Asghari, her husband of 14 months, on Saturday in the caption of an Instagram video, which showed her shaking her butt to Janet Jackson’s “If.” “[Six] years is a long time to be with someone so, I’m a little shocked but … I’m not here to explain why because its [sic] honestly nobody’s business,” she said of the split, per USA Today. She did a little explaining despite that, writing that “I couldn’t take the pain anymore honestly.” She continued, “I would lo…

Online content moderation is a stressful job, but someone’s got to do it—though now an East African firm is saying it wishes its workers weren’t those someones. Per the Guardian, employees are now bringing lawsuits against both outsourcing company Sama and Meta, Facebook’s parent, after they say they were traumatized by the content they viewed during the course of their work, including suicides, beheadings, and other violent videos. “You ask the question: ‘Do I regret it?'” says Sama CEO Wendy Gonzalez of her decision to take on the Facebook moderation. “If I knew what I know now … I would h…

Online content moderation is a stressful job, but someone’s got to do it—though now an East African firm is saying it wishes its workers weren’t those someones. Per the Guardian, employees are now bringing lawsuits against both outsourcing company Sama and Meta, Facebook’s parent, after they say they were traumatized by the content they viewed during the course of their work, including suicides, beheadings, and other violent videos. “You ask the question: ‘Do I regret it?'” says Sama CEO Wendy Gonzalez of her decision to take on the Facebook moderation. “If I knew what I know now … I would h…

While it won’t do much to turn its financial situation around, the company formerly known as Twitter is selling off more memorabilia from its offices—including plenty of items with the bird logo. The online auction, titled Twitter Rebranding, will run from Sept. 12 to Sept. 14, and while all 584 lots have an opening bid of $25 and many of them are standard office equipment, some items will likely fetch tens of thousands of dollars, Mashable reports. The items include the bird logo still mounted on the company’s San Francisco headquarters, though the listing says the buyer “is responsible for h…

Special counsel Jack Smith’s team obtained a search warrant in January for records related to former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, and Twitter complied after some initial resistance, according to court documents released Wednesday. The details were included in a decision from the federal appeals court in Washington rejecting Twitter’s claim that it should not have been held in contempt or sanctioned because it missed the deadline for complying, the AP reports. The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant directing Twitter to produce information on Trump’s account after a cour…

“X” may not mark the spot after all for Elon Musk in his attempted rebrand of Twitter. Although Musk has officially unveiled the 24th letter of the alphabet as his social media site’s new name and identity, Insider reports that rival Meta appears to own the trademark for an “X” logo as it pertains to “online social networking services” and “social networking services in the fields of entertainment, gaming, and application development.” The two competing logos don’t look alike—Fox News shows a side-by-side view, noting that Meta’s X logo has been registered since 2019—but since Musk wants to sl…

He wasn’t joking: Elon Musk has replaced Twitter’s iconic bird logo with the letter X, reports TechCrunch. But it’s no mere cosmetic change: Twitter itself has begun rebranding to be known as X, per the Washington Post. “X.com now points to twitter.com,” Musk wrote in a Sunday tweet. As the Verge notes, this is all in line with Musk’s previously stated vision to change Twitter into what he called an “everything app.” He informed employees with an email saying it would be his last from “Twitter.com,” the outlet notes. And new CEO Linda Yaccarino is fully on board. “X is here!” she wrote. “Let’s…

Twitter’s bird logo is known the world over, but its days appear to be numbered. Elon Musk tweeted overnight that he intends to ditch the bird for some kind of X-themed logo, reports CNN. “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” he wrote. He’s also apparently ready to make the move quickly: “If a good enough X logo is posted tonight, we’ll make go live worldwide tomorrow,” he wrote early Sunday. Musk kicked off the discussion when he posted a flickering X and later responded “yes” in a Twitter Spaces chat when someone asked if the logo was changing, not…

A new class-action lawsuit accuses Twitter of failing to pay $500 million or more in severance it owes to laid-off employees. According to the class-action lawsuit proposed in a San Francisco federal court by Courtney McMillian, a former human resources employee at Twitter who was let go in January, a 2019 severance plan promised most workers two months of base pay (six months for more senior workers) plus a week of pay per full year of employment in the event of a layoff, and other benefits. When mass layoffs did take place after Elon Musk took over the company, however, workers received at m…

If Elon Musk were hoping Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival would flop upon arrival, it’s clear by now his hopes have been dashed. Zuckerberg wrote Friday on Threads that the new platform had logged 70 million signups in less than 48 hours, reports the Guardian. The Meta CEO hasn’t provided an update since, but the Verge projects the number is more than 100 million as of Sunday. Meaning Threads has “quickly blown past the other Twitter alternatives” in its brief run, writes Wes Davis. Advantage: One big reason Threads has thrived so quickly is that it’s linked to Instagram and its massive existin…

Twitter has welcomed Threads aboard by threatening to sue its owner, Meta. CEO Mark Zuckerberg received a letter hours after Thread’s launch Wednesday accusing the more senior social media platform of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Semafor reports. Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro also accuses Meta of hiring dozens of ex-Twitter employees with access to confidential company information, including “trade secrets and other intellectual property.” Spiro wrote in the cease-and-desist letter that Twitter plans to enforce its…

Facebook and Twitter have long been rivals in the social networking space, but now it appears Mark Zuckerberg is taking things up a notch. The Facebook founder is expected to launch on Thursday what the Wall Street Journal refers to as a “Twitter clone” and what social media analysts see as a “formidable competitor” for the Elon Musk-owned site, which continues to experience quite a bit of chaos. The New York Times reports some “techies” are calling Zuck’s app a “Twitter killer.” “Threads” is a microblogging app that will join Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram under the umbrella of parent comp…

Users around the world reported difficulties with Twitter on Saturday. Many said theywere greeted with “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” messages when they tried to post or even view tweets, CNBC reports. Downdetector.com reports showed the problems intensifying early in the morning. The platform has had such problems several times since Elon Musk took over, including outages in February and March. There’s no indication of what the cause of the current one is or when it might end, per MarketWatch. Twitter was asked to comment but has not so far. More From Newser Electric ‘Flyin…

The “Velvet Hammer” is already getting it done at Twitter. Linda Yaccarino, the “hard-charging executive” enticed by Elon Musk from overseeing ads at NBCUniversal to become Twitter’s new CEO, is paying the social media company’s bills again—specifically, to Google, reports the Wall Street Journal. Platformer had reported earlier this month that Twitter had ceased paying the Alphabet company for its cloud services, “leading to a high-stakes conflict” between the entities, but Yaccarino has now apparently swooped in to mend ties and get the cash flowing again, for a tab that was amounting to abo…